Originally Posted by
frankenmike
Cyclaholic, your explanation reads like my physics textbook, so I doubt anybody who tries to find flaws with it will have much success.
In my world that's quite a compliment so thank you.
Originally Posted by
frankenmike
That being said, even though gyro forces really don't do much for stability most of the time, on high speed descents (40+ mph) I can feel a stabilizing force which I believe to be gyroscopic in nature- like the bike stays up without any balancing necessary on my part.
You know, having hit some scary speeds on the bike I can totally understand someone feeling like that is the case... and I definitely wasn't thinking about physics at speed, except for the physical consequences of an unscheduled dismount
Ultimately it really doesn't matter because an understanding of the underlying physics has absolutely no bearing on someone's ability to ride a bike. However, if someone wants to understand what's going on in terms of the physics of a bicycle (the whole point of this thread) then that paper that CB HI linked to is a good starting point. Here it is again...
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~fajans...eerBikeAJP.PDF
...here's a little something to ponder: a bike underway is always turning, either one way or the other, it's never truly going straight but the minute correcting turns average out into a straight line in the direction you're going. That's the nature of a dynamically unstable system.